Introduction

Anarchism flourished between the 1860s and the 1930s. During these decades it attracted the adherence of mass movements of the working class, principally in Europe and the Americas. Its heyday can be more precisely located from around 1880 until the First World War. But libertarian thinkers were developing the anarchist critique of contemporary nineteenth-century society during the earlier decades, beginning indeed with William Godwin in the 1790s (although he remained unrecognized as an anarchist theorist and precursor until exactly one hundred years later).